Reconciling
by mascaret
Summary: A small collection of stand alone Laura/Bill scenes that are connected by Bill’s reoccurring thought that sometimes it was difficult to reconcile this woman with the one he first met.
1. Cain and Able

A/N Thank you Beth for taking the time to beta check this. You were a great help. Any remaining errors are solely my own.

_Reconciling_

Walking into the President's office, the Commander missed her at first glance. The jacket of her suit was on her desk chair, but she wasn't.

On the phone when Bill arrived, Billy had just waved for him to enter.

While Bill didn't wish to disturb the President if she was resting, Admiral Cain was due to be arriving soon as well. Now that the Cylon Resurrection ship had been destroyed it was time to determine the fate of his two crewmen. Though he knew she had to be woken, he was hesitant - unsure whether she would appreciate him being the one to do it. Respectful of the fact that she would not necessarily be pleased about being seen at her most vulnerable, he turned back toward the curtain to get Billy.

Her voice low and at his side, startled him. "Leaving so soon?"

Seated in the first chair past the curtain, she had been easy to miss on the way into the room. He had been standing right beside her and hadn't noticed her.

Seating himself across from her, he took in her appearance while giving a report on the just competed mission – a report he full well knew she had already been given.

Her color still wasn't good. Unlike in their earlier meeting with Admiral Cain, there was no way that the Admiral would be able to miss the deterioration in the President's condition. Of more concern to him was Laura. She was dressed in one of her usual blouses and skirts, but in place of the suit jacket she wore her heavy cream-colored bathrobe. Her hands were in the pockets. It seemed the cold was becoming more of an issue.

"The mission was a complete success. Remarkably, we had only four fatalities."

"_Captain Apollo_ was recovered? He is all right?"

With his head down to veil the way his lips curled at the way she spoke his son's call sign almost as a term of endearment, Bill nodded. "He will be."

"Good." She took in a breath. "Now there is just the matter of Cain."

Despite the concession of the bathrobe, she looked less weak than the last time he had seen her. He hated to admit it even to himself that she looked weak, but she did. Not in spirit, but in her physical frame it was unmistakable.

Still, that thought was not quite right. It wasn't that she looked any less weak than the last time he saw her or less tired or less dying. He couldn't quite place what it was that was different about her.

It was her resolve, he finally decided. Her continued air of determination. Despite the success of this critical mission, she gave no impression of being relieved, of standing down. Her determination, her resolve remained. It was as if she were still on an alert, still tensed, awaiting something more.

"She is late. I had hoped she would get here before you." She made the offering to the silence.

Bill raised an eyebrow. "Not starting to prefer her company to mine, I hope?"

Laura offered a half smile, but no words.

Not having anything to say, Bill merely observed her until Billy entered.

The young man didn't look well. If possible he exceeded the President for lack of color and his hands were trembling. "Admiral Cain's shuttle still hasn't even departed the _Pegasus_. I put in a call. Waiting to hear back."

"Good. If Admiral Cain ever deigns to grace us with her presence we can finish this." Taking in her aide's appearance, the President tried to dismiss him. "Billy, you should go."

"I'll stay."

Bill voiced his concern, but it was not for Billy. "You _should_ go, Billy. You're looking a little peaked." Bill knew that in Laura's weakened condition any added illness could not be tolerated. Despite how devoted Billy was to her, if her aide was ill, he really shouldn't be here.

Laura lowered her voice. "You don't _have_ to be here for this." Though they were audible to Bill as well, her words or at least their meaning were clearly intended only for her aide.

"I'll stay." He insisted as he took the empty seat next to the President.

The President nodded before offering a small bit of knowledge no doubt gleaned during her recent illness. "If you hold something in your hand, the shaking isn't as readily noticeable."

Steady as it came out of the bathrobe pocket to cover Billy's, Laura's hand was not currently in need of such artifice.

Bill sought out Laura's gaze, but it wasn't forthcoming.

The phone rang.

As Billy had the window seat and looked as though he would fall if he had to stand, Bill crossed to the President's desk to answer the phone himself.

"Adama here." He paused to allow the person on the other end to speak. "Do we know who or how?" Again a pause. "I'll inform the President."

The President's eyes narrowed. "Cain isn't coming, is she?"

He put the receiver back down on the desk. "Cain is dead."

Bill saw skepticism in the President's eyes. "You?"

Billy let out a sigh. Putting his head down between his knees, he rubbed his hands over his face.

Interested in Billy's reaction, Bill shook his head. "The Cylon prisoner is missing."

Laura's rubbing of comforting circles across the back of her young aide was the only hit of emotion to her reaction. "That's certainly an unexpected turn of events."

A slight metallic click sounded behind him. Recognizing it immediately for what it was – a gun safety being moved - Bill whirled around. He pushed aside the curtain to what passed for the Presidential bedroom. There he found the head of the President's security detail. The gun he lowered to his side _now_ had the safety _on_.

Coming from the President's personal quarters, the man would have approached from behind where Adama would have been sitting, side by side with Cain.

"That will be all."

"Yes, Madam President."

If he had thought the world gone mad before, now Bill knew it as the young man paused in front of the President. The Commander watched her extract the hand that hadn't left the pocket of her bathrobe since his arrival. In that hand, she too held a gun. Taking it from her, the guard clicked the safety on before continuing through the curtain.

Although Adama had been unconscious in sickbay at the time that it had occurred, he had later heard about the Cylon boarding and the President's first excursion from the brig. He knew of her refusal to hold a gun even to defend herself.

"Thank you, Billy. Why don't you go take care of that other matter we discussed?"

She spoke without preamble as her faithful aide departed.

"Discontented with the President's interference and unwilling to wait a few more days for nature to take its course, the Admiral decided to hurry the dying leader along. Shot and killed in the assassination attempt. Her crew knew her. They would have believed it."

He made no attempt to conceal the hurt and disappointment from his voice. "You planned this without discussing it with me?"

She met his gaze unabashedly. "It wasn't something that was open for discussion. It had to be done."

Nor could he conceal his disbelief. "You were just going to let me wander into a gunfight unaware?"

She remained unmoved. "Forgive me for saying so Bill, but you didn't get to where you are today on your looks. I was confident you would be able to pick up on things as they unfolded."

At the brazenness in her words and eyes, he couldn't help but comment, "And you certainly didn't get here on looks either, Madam President."

"I don't know about that, Commander." She spoke with more than a hint of amusement. "I am aware that I am looking a little faded at the moment, but back on Caprica I managed to turn a head or two that I maybe shouldn't have."

The tenor of their conversation was certainly changing quickly.

To his lifted eyebrow, she offered a wicked grin. "You wouldn't believe how far a bit of intelligence, a flash of leg, and a dash of mathematical absurdity can get a girl around here."

Not quite believing any of it, he smiled. "You don't look faded to me."

The halving of her smile told him that she didn't quite believe him either. "I i_feel/i_ faded." Again the tenor shifted dramatically. "Bill, we're talking days now, not weeks. You need to realize that."

Unable to say anything to that, he looked down to his hands clasped together in his lap.

"It had to be done and I couldn't be sure that you would follow through. You have to live with your decisions and the actions that you take, Bill. I realize that can be quite limiting. I'm under no such limitations."

She paused, waiting for him to meet her gaze. When he did, she continued. "Bill, you need to understand that there is _nothing_ that I would not do to ensure the safety of the people of this fleet. To ensure your safety. Bill, it is absolutely vital to this fleet that you remain alive."

She repeated it for emphasis. "_Nothing_."

He thought that he had understood on Kobol where he had met her to put their family back together, but it was only now that he truly realized the full measure of her devotion to the fleet. And now to him. He didn't mistake her emphasis on him as a declaration of love and adoration. He knew it to be a mark of the trust and respect that had been building between them.

For some time now, he had been aware of certain emotions developing in him - emotions that strayed beyond trust and respect. However he was aware that these sentiments were exclusively his own. The woman before him had spent the past few months wholly consumed by her devotion to the fleet and the task of fulfilling her supposed role as their dying leader. She hadn't the time or the mindset for anything beyond that.

Had they had the leisure of unlimited time, how might things have progressed?

Too often, he had to stop himself from wondering.

"Laura, I would have made the call. If it came to it, I would have made the call."

"When? Before or after she did?" She leaned toward him, almost sympathetically. "It's okay to admit it, Bill. You choked. You couldn't do it."

She held up her hand to forestall his response.

"I don't say it as an insult. No, really I don't. What we have, the way we are, it's worked for us. It's worked well. We complement each other."

She was right. They made quite the pair. His near death experience had softened him. Her experiences while dying had hardened her. The differences he supposed between having been briefly near death and really getting to experience it. Sometimes it was difficult for him to reconcile this woman with the 'schoolteacher' he had met at the decommissioning of the _Galactica _not six months earlier.

"Look Bill, I don't mind playing the heavy, but we both know that that isn't a luxury that you will be able to enjoy for much longer. You've grown soft, Bill, but you are going to need to step back up."

As he stated to protest, she again cut him off. "Commander, I have no illusions about how much longer I will be around. You need to step up. You are going to be completely alone in this. I frakked up, Bill. I miscalculated. I thought I could hold out until the election. If I was being more pragmatic about the time I had left I never would have chosen Baltar. At best he will prove incompetent. At worst I can't even begin to fathom."

He wanted to assuage the guilt he saw in her eyes. "You didn't exactly have a lot of options at the time. Given the choice between a terrorist and …" was there even a single word that could adequately describe Baltar? "Sometimes you just have to go with what you have. Sometimes you gotta roll the hard six."

She stared him in the eye. "Bill, what the hell does that actually mean? 'Roll the hard six?'"

He was tired of talking about what he knew was soon to come. He was tired of hearing her talk about it as the forgone conclusion that it was. He wanted to see the hope back in her eyes. He wanted to see her laugh at least one more time.

He deadpanned, "Damned if I know. I just like saying it."

As he had hoped, she couldn't help but laugh.

But all too soon she was back to the business at hand. "What now? A state funeral with full honors?"

He nodded.

She scoffed. "You'll forgive me if I sit this one out. But not to worry, you have my word, the next one I'll be front and center."

He recoiled at her gallows humor. "I should get over to the _Pegasus._ See what more I can learn."

"Yes, you should." She agreed.

He was at the curtain when she said it again.

"There is nothing, Bill, absolutely nothing that I wouldn't do."

He nodded.

"What about you, Bill? Are you able to say the same?"

He paused before responding and when he did, his voice was hesitant not because he was uncertain, but because he knew her question was not a casual one. It hadn't escaped him that she still seemed to hold her resolve even after the news of Cain. It suggested to him that there was something else – something at least as equally distasteful, yet to come.

"If it was something that had to be done." He finally replied.

He remained; hand on the curtain, waiting to see if she would ask it of him now or if she would wait.

"Thank you, Commander." It was said as a dismissal.

"Madam President." He offered in return before continuing out.


	2. To Serve Man

A/N A big thanks to mary_me11 who rewatched 'The Passage' to answer a question for me – and will no doubt be horrified once she reads this and discovers that *this* was what it was for.

Written because you just know that if it had come to it Laura would have made the call.

_Reconciling III_

_To Serve Man_

The call had come down that the President's shuttle had landed. They were just awaiting her arrival in the wardroom to get started. Until then ...

"A steak an inch thick with caramelized onions. Mashed potatoes on the side." Lee suggested.

"No. Fried chicken." Helo countered.

Bill didn't think that the current topic of conversation was a helpful one but he did nothing to put an end to it. He noticed that Saul and Cottle didn't join in with the young ones either.

"Medium rare. Warm and pink on the inside." Lee insisted. "Oh what I wouldn't do for a nice juicy steak right now."

Laura came through the open hatch in time to hear Lee's groan of longing.

Given the direness of the situation, Bill had been of the mind that more heads were better than less in the hopes of generating ideas. Watching Laura's eyes quickly travel the room, taking note of who was present, clearly she was of a different mindset.

It was more than clear from the narrowing of her eyes as they settled on Helo that Laura was still piqued about what had happened with the cylon prisoners. Bill waited for her to object to Helo's presence, but she didn't.

Wasting no time, as soon as she was seated, she launched right into it. "Once we have the first wave of deaths how long will it take for rendering?"

Eyes downcast, Bill felt an emptiness that had nothing to do with the contents of his stomach.

"Rendering?" Lee repeated confused.

The _President_ ignored Lee's question and asked another of her own. "And are there any diseases we need to worry about being transmitted through ingestion?"

The silence that followed her question was broken by Saul's chuckle.

"I got sober for this? Frak that! I'm going back to my quarters to find a bottle to crawl back into to die."

"She didn't really just ask what I think she just asked?" Karl Agathon asked as the hatch reclosed behind Saul.

Bill listened to his son stutter. "You can't seriously expect us to – to –"

"- As distasteful – and I mean that in_ every_ possible interpretation of the word – as it may seem we do have a food source on … hand." Even the President couldn't help but cringe on her last word.

"For three years now we've managed to avoid death at the hands of the cylons. I refuse to have mold in the food supply be the cause of the extinction of the entire human race."

"You can't actually expect people to eat … " Helo's voice contorted in disgust. " … people! There's no way they will do it if you tell them what they are eating!"

"I think you're wrong, Captain Agathon, but just in case, we're not going to tell them. We'll tell everyone that we found a way to decontaminate the existing food supply. I have Tory setting up a press conference for this afternoon as we speak."

Lee was horrified. "Dad!"

Before Bill could formulate a response, the President interjected. "Let me save you the soul searching, Bill. Consider it a Presidential Order."

To Cottle, she asked. "In your earlier projections you said seven to ten days. How long will this add to our life expectancy?"

Cottle answered dryly. "The more that die the more food that becomes available and the less competition for it. We could go on for quite some time that way."

Bill heard her chair creak as she leaned forward in it. "Walk me through this. How is this going to work?"

Cottle did a fair job of keeping his tone detached as he responded. "The first to succumb will be the children and the elderly -"

" - Not the children." She interrupted, her voice almost a plea - albeit an angry one.

"You asked how it was going to work. I'm just telling you how it's going to happen."

She shook her head. "That's unacceptable."

"You'll get no argument from me." Cottle shot right back at her. "There's not a damn thing about the current situation that's acceptable."

"We _cannot_ lose the children. The children are our hope for the future. If we are to survive as a species -"

Bill heard the telltale thud of her glasses hitting the table as she let out an audible breath. Without looking up, he knew that she was running her fingers along the spot at her temple where her stress headaches usually originated.

Again she was the first to speak. The steel was back in her voice. "We'll have a lottery."

And again Lee was slow to pick up on what was being said. "Instead of spreading out what rations we have left equally, you're suggesting we give those rations to a select few?"

The President – Bill couldn't bear to think of her as Laura at this particular moment – ignored Lee's interruption and went on. "Women past child bearing age. Men past sixty."

"You do realize that that includes three of the five people in this room. Will your name be going into the draw, Madame President?" Helo demanded.

"Obviously -" She sounded more tired than Bill had ever heard her before. More tired even than during those first few days when the cylons arrived every thirty odd minutes. " - certain people will need to be excluded."

Listening to her work out the details as she went along, Bill closed his eyes and tried to remember. He tried to remember the woman who by the virtue of alphabetical organization of departments had had the office next to the Secretary of Defense's in the Presidential Offices on Caprica. The woman whose ungovernable giggling while prepping to go before Adar's quorum had one time – well at least one time in Bill's presence - driven _that_ Admiral to threaten to discharge his weapon at her through their shared wall.

He tried to remember the sound of it, but it had been so long.

"Those with certain irreplaceable skill sets will be exempt."

Or even to remember the woman from the first day of the attacks – the one who had ordered her aide to get daily reports from the Captain of the _Astral Queen_ on his prisoners' well-being inorder to discourage mysterious deaths.

"The official statement will be that we need more workers for the food processing ships."

The interceding years had not been kind to any of them, but they seemed to have been especially cruel to that woman.

"You're going to get them to willingly walk right to their -" Helo couldn't even finish the thought. " - You're not human! But you're not cylon either! The cylons have more humanity than you do!"

Pulled unwillingly from his revery, Bill scolded his junior officer. "That's enough, Captain Agathon!"

The President wasn't phased by the younger man's castigation. "Then maybe this is a good thing. Maybe this experience will make me more human. After all, you are what you eat."

"You can't actually expect to keep this a secret. Word is going to get out."

"Only Tory and the people in this room know about this. If word gets out, Captain Agathon, then it's easy enough to figure out who leaked it. And this time you won't be able to hide behind the Admiral's skirt."

Bill didn't bother to look at her. She was already moving on.

"In fact, Captain, you can be the one in charge of running the lottery."

Helo looked horrified. "Why me?"

"Because I want you to realize that after your little stunt with the air purification system you now get to own a part of the responsibility for every single death that the cylons cause - directly or indirectly. Because you are part of the solution or you're part of the problem, Captain, and one way or another, I intend to make you part of the solution."

Lee tried to reason with her. "There _has_ to be another way."

Her agitation at everyone's lack of support for her impossible decision was evident. "Come on Lee. Just before the meeting started didn't you say that you'd do anything for a nice juicy steak?"

Turning to Cottle, she inquired. "How much meat could you pull off of Captain Agathon over there?

"The human body is composed primarily of water so not as much as you might think." Cottle responded humorlessly.

"Admiral!" Helo turned to him again.

Feeling the beginnings of his own stress headache, Bill interceded. "Before we start making any announcements, let's wait to see if Sharon comes up with anything in the star cluster."

"Sharon?" She shook her head. "Sharon is how many hours overdue now?"

Rising from her seat in preparation of leaving, she refused to be dissuaded. "This _is_ happening, Admiral. Whether we like it or not, _this is happening."_

As the others slowly filed out after her, Bill called his acting XO aside. "Helo! A word."

"Sir -"

Bill cut the young man off before he could even begin. "- The President is just trying to do anything she can to keep her people alive."

His expression displaying all the horror that Bill himself felt, Helo asked. "At what cost, sir?"

"At any cost." Bill admitted to the empty room after Helo had departed.


	3. Eye of the Beholder

_Reconciling IV_

Completely leaving aside for the moment his outrage that _his _Chief Medical Officer had concealed this plot from him, in a not exactly deserted corner of sickbay Bill laid into the older man for other aspects of his sin. "How could you have agreed to go along with this? To fake the death of a child?"

"You know perfectly well why I did it!" Cottle barked back.

"You took an oath – First do no harm!"

"And I did no harm! Not to my patient!"

"What about Sharon? Wasn't she your patient too? If you hadn't cooperated there was no way that the President would have been able to make the switch happen!"

Even after everything that she had done for them – all the times that she had risked her life for them, there were so many people still unwilling to treat Sharon Agathon with the courtesy they would a household animal, but Cottle had never been one of them. That was what made his role in this so hard to understand.

"I know that."

_"Then why?"_ Bill wanted to know. "Why go along with it?"

"Sharon was going to be mourning the death of her child either way. The _only _question was whether that baby had to actually die for her to do it."

"She was bluffing! If she said she was going to harm the baby, she was bluffing!"

"She never made a threat. She didn't have to." Cottle answered flatly.

"You can't really think that the President would have –"

"_With her bare hands if she had to!_" Cottle didn't make him finish.

Bill was disgusted with the other man for even thinking such a thing. His face showed it. "An innocent child?"

"Are you that love struck?"

Nearby Ishay dropped the supplies she was restocking.

"There is nothing going on between myself and the President." Bill responded truthfully.

"Did I say that there was?" Cottle snapped back. "I said you were in love with her. I never said you were fool enough to act on it."

Leaving the boxes on the floor, Ishay moved to the other side of sickbay without so much as a glance.

"What? Just because it's been two years I'm just supposed to block out the way you were mooning all over her while she lay here dying?"

With just a glare, Bill warned him to back down from that avenue of inquiry.

"When she first came to me with the idea, I told the President that I wouldn't be a part of her plan, but once I had time to think it over I realized … better to fake the death of a child than –" Cottle shook his head.

Adamantly, Bill denied it. "She wouldn't have gone through with it. If you had refused to cooperate, she wouldn't have actually gone through with it!"

Towards the end of her struggle with cancer Laura had confessed to him that towards the very end of her mother's struggle with cancer when it was firmly entrenched in her brain, Laura had put a pillow over her mother's face in an attempt to suffocate her and end both of their suffering. She hadn't been able to go through with it. She hadn't been able to take the life of the woman who had given her life. Bill refused to believe that she could have taken the life of the child that had given her life.

"Bill, she saw the child as a threat to the fleet. The cylons went to a lot of trouble to make that baby. Even if the baby herself wasn't a danger, they weren't just going to walk away empty handed. She gave the order to terminate Sharon's pregnancy. The only reason that child was even born was because you never followed through with her order. Did you really think she was just going to let it go because you proved not to have the stones to do it?"

Knowing the truth of the other man's words, Bill's denials became less adamant. "She wouldn't have –"

"- Do I think she wanted to do it?" Cottle snapped at him again. "No! That's why she came to me. She didn't want to have to do it. It would have killed one more part of her soul – and sometimes I wonder just how much of it is left - but do I think she would have done it? _With her bare hands_." He repeated.

Head down, Bill said nothing. The truth was he had had a moment of doubt himself about Laura's part in Hera's death.

Mistaking the meaning of his silence, Cottle continued the fight alone. "Were you not there when she asked how long it would take to render the first wave of famine fatalities into food for the rest of the fleet? She means to get this band of ships to Earth, Bill. If her own soul be damned along the way so be it!

"I bet if you asked her the only mistake that she'll admit to in the whole thing was in keeping the baby too close on New Caprica and losing her objectivity - because _that_ is the only reason she didn't snap that little girl's neck the second the first centurion put its foot down on New Caprican soil."

Cottle's voice softened. "She's a beautiful woman, Bill, on the outside and in, but there is ugliness there too. Is it the actual woman you're in love with or some idealized version that you've fabricated in your head?"

Cottle didn't wait for an answer before walking away.

_finis_


End file.
